Voyage of discovery

This last two days have seen a really nice change to the environment, it is gloriously sunny and quite tropical , this for me is a delight as I bask like a lizard in the sunshine, OK OK, I know its bad for my skin and it will turn me into a cancerous prune, but I get a genuine pleasure out of sunny weather, something like an emotional high, it makes me want to do things and see things, so it makes me go out and explore, that is what I did yesterday afternoon, I went for a long walk along the river bank, it was teeming with the local black fly or midges that were basically flying jaws and were eating me alive for the entire time but I just kept going as it was a perfect day. I found myself again listening to the calls of the jungle birds here and the chorus was amazing, I can understand people buying CD’s of jungle music as it is quite amazing and totally different to anything else I have ever listened to. It was a constant high level background din basically of screeching and warbling and chirping of birds I could not see but really would have liked to. I scrambled across the gravel banks of the river as it is very low this time of year across to an island that sits in the river and looks like it harbours lots of the calling birds. I saw a flock of birds that I thought looked like Nighjars but they were very good at disguising themselves amongst the rocks and I didn’t want to disturb them. But I did see the local specialty, the black necked stilt,

what a wonderful bird and so elegantly dressed for the occasion, all dressed up for the ball and no music to be had. That left me feeling good as I had seen a new species for me and I ran away as quick as possible as my vision had become blurred by the 30 million biting bugs that had swarmed around my head. I then saw a blur of red dashing about the path in front of me and a fantastic little bird was looking at me and thinking, ‘what a crazy asshole walking about in the sun along the riverbank being eaten by the bugs, must be English’. It was a pretty bird but again I don’t know its name, but it will take me a good while to search through the 1800 different bird species that live here in Peru. I have had the offer of a book with all the Peruvian birds in it and while I was talking about the birds I mentioned that I had seen some animal footprints in the sand along the river and they told me that this area is full of Pecary and Jaguars and Tapirs, she said she had seen the Jaguar swimming across the river. I am tempted to do some more investigating at night to try and see some of them myself.
I am swimming in a sea of my own ignorance with my hideously bad Spanish. I cannot hold a conversation I only utter present tense, first person, 3 word sentences at people who normally laugh at what I say, then they talk to me in acceptable English and all is well but it isn’t doing me any favours really. It is astonishing that everyone here wants to learn English and will tolerate my utterings as long as I speak to them now and again in English. They want practice at all costs and I am better than nothing but they really want an American to speak to as I speak strange. Nothing new there then but my Spanish is improving as I am learning new words daily and I am even practising my verb conjugations which I haven’t had the motivation to do before. Some thing is stirring inside of me to make a change to my mental attitude to learning a foreign language. Hopefully it will all fall into place over the next year, I am tempted to put my brazil move on hold until I am fluent in my new found language, I cannot spend all my life trying to slip into a lost conversation “I don’t see my suitcases”, and not have people laughing at me.